Archives for July, 2005

In about 5 hours, Queen’s 3rd year students all over the world will begin registering for their courses for the upcoming year. (Gah, two months and a week left.)
Choosing courses was the usual ordeal for me.
In choosing my English courses, I took my time perusing the reading lists, the professor bios, the abstracts. Then I chose the courses that most appealed to me.
In choosing my Life Science courses, I held my breath and chose those courses whose titles seemed replled me the least.

Bloody hell. I’m a coward, I know. But oh bloody hell.

I am reading Ella Minnow Pea, A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn. This is Dunn’s first novel; he’s apparently a well known playwright.
The blurb on the back had me grinning with delight.

Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

I need a dictionary close by when reading this book, but it’s not at all overbearing. I’m on page 14 and I think it’s cute. Yes friends, I just called a book “cute.”
For instance, upon losing the letter Z, Ella writes the following:

Hundreds of words await ostracism from our functional vocabularies: waltz and fizz and squeeze and booze and frozen pizza pie, frizzy and fuzzy and dizzy and duzzy, the visualization of emphyzeema-zapped Tarzans, wheezing and sneezing, holding glazed and anodized bazookas, seized by all the bizarrities of the zany zone we call home. Dazed or zombified citizen recognize hazardous organizations of zealots in their hazy midst, too late — too late to size down. Immobilized we iz. Minimalized. Paralyzed. Zip. Zap. ZZZZZZZZZZ.
Crazy.
Crazy.
Did I say crazy?

The first few lines of that quotation reminded me of Roald Dahl’s The BFG and Boy.

This is a book I will definitely buy. Two copies, one for myself and for an old Algebra teacher who waxed poetic over the beauty of Alice in Wonderland. Oh and my high school English teacher, too. (In grade 11, she introduced us, her class, to blogging. So this is all because of her, really.)